His friends and loved ones called him Sasha. The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, knew him as Alexander Litvinenko, agent of the FSB, formerly known as the Soviet KGB.

Someone dropped, as Litvinenko's father described it, "a little atomic bomb" into Sasha, one which took an agonizing 23 days to "do the job." Now the name Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko will be known around the world, and perhaps to eternity, as the target of the first homicidal use of atomic weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would not prove an easy thing to forget. The whole story, or at least the heart and soul of this martyrdom, is contained in the book, Death of a Dissident by Alex Goldfarb and Sasha's own wife, Marina Litvinenko.

Mr. Litvinenko was the child of the universally human truth that declares "no one likes a liar!" In his case, he, among others as well, was asked by his Russian governmental superiors to execute a man he knew and respected, Boris Berezovsky. Alexander and some of his FSB colleagues refused. He was then arrested by his own FSB for a crime he had not committed. He fled Russia and defected to England where he received sanctuary. For the remaining few years of his life, he and his contacts in Russia investigated the truth of FSB charges against Chechnya's Muslims, one accusation of which, the terrorist blowing up of a Moscow apartment building, became Russia's excuse for an all-out war against Chechen separatists.

Alexander Litvinenko had found the terrorist charge to be a lie. Big or small, powerful or insignificant, no one, including liars themselves, can like a liar.

Ironically, President Vladimir Putin, while possibly being a liar … for reasons of state of course, has been refreshingly honest and candid about his re-establishing the old Soviet rules regarding the execution of people for, well, "reasons of state." France has been using "raison d'etat" for centuries. It justified the entire, Guillotine massacre within her 18th century revolution, during which the "commune" and Communism were born.

"Moscow , February 1, 2007: Speaking at a Kremlin press conference, President Putin indicates that the Russian secret services considered Litvinenko an insignificant target, and would not, therefore, have bothered to murder him."

Hmmm …

"Insignificant target" … but a target nonetheless.

"'He didn't know any secrets,' says Putin. ‘Before being fired from the FSB Litvinenko served in the convoy troops and had no access to state secrets.'"

Following this quote, the author, Alex Goldfarb, then compares President Putin's "dismissals" to those of the Nixon administration during the brewing scandal of Watergate.

Breaking and entering, or B & E's such as the Watergate incident, are minor felonies when compared to the dropping of a "little atomic bomb" upon a political dissident. A governing administration using such Polonium poetry wants to terrorize more than its own citizens. As I have said, it is, in actuality, the first known use of a tactical nuclear weapon against human life since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To put things in further perspective, we are told that Third Millennium nuclear and hydrogen bombs make the ones used on Japan in World War II look like crude versions of Polonium 210. To comprehend the density of death contained in Polonium, you should read Death of a Dissident. You should also consider seriously what Vladimir Putin's Russia has planned for the rest of the world.

President George W. Bush has describes Vladimir Putin as "very straightforward and trustworthy."

As one character in Death of a Dissident remarks, "that quote says more about Bush than about Putin."

With such world leadership joining forces, where are we going? And will the Progressive alternative offered by the Clintons, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and the Progressive Republican Giuliani be an antidote to the Bush philosophy? Or will it prove a deeper progress down the same ugly road?

Where have the likes of the Bush family, Boris Yeltsin and Clinton been leading us: Into more and more lies.

Putin was Yeltsin's increasingly regressive choice to succeed him. It is almost as if President Yeltsin "played" the democrat to draw all the Russian, closet Capitalists, such as Boris Berezovsky, out into the open, so the likes of President Putin could more easily exile and/or execute them.

George Soros, the American multi-billionaire socialist and major investor in the Barack Obama presidential campaign, remains the most mysterious figure in Alex Goldfarb's book. Gigantically successful at capitalism, George Soros has supported and championed socialism. He has yet, as far as I know, to speak out against Vladimir Putin. The increasingly rigid and dictatorial measures which Putin has been taking have yet to disturb Soros … or at least I have not heard of him speaking out against them.

Imbued with a sense of Marxist inevitability and the increasingly Socialist centralization of world power, George Soros has picked Barack Obama as the best man to lead the United States and the world back into Third Millennium Soviet style, economic management. Does his personally handpicked candidate, Barack Obama, have similarly Putinesque plans for the United States?

The American public's acquiescence to this trend and the self-contradictory policies of the neoconservatism, such as President George W. Bush's failed but total acceptance of a rabidly leftist immigration bill, have trapped the United States in a two party system that steps more completely, hand in hand, toward Marxism. For Bush to embrace Putin as "very straightforward and trustworthy" is … well … Are there any new ways to comprehend President Bush's horrifying enthusiasm for the Progressive New World Order and his father's idea of the "Pax Americana?" It is as blind as the entire Bush family's claim that they are pro-life. They are all now Progressive Christians which is like saying they are President Franklin Roosevelt's idea of a "good Republican," bad guys, but "they are our bad guys," as FDR once described a South American dictator allied to the United States. At least that is Bill Clinton's feeling, particularly about George Bush, Sr. They're pals, Bill and George, George and Bill. They are in total agreement about one thing: the Pax Americana. In other words, an Americanized world federation that keeps Washington, D. C., the central power because, like Octavius Caesar of the Pax Romana, it concedes and even aids and abets in the crucifixion of men like Alexander Litvinenko.

According to the historian Adrian Goldsworthy, Julius Caesar, the immediate predecessor to Octavius Caesar and the famous Pax Romana marked the end of Rome as a republic, as a senatorially governed nation, and its beginnings as an imperially governed, swiftly expanding empire, under one man's total power and leadership.

With such a role model in mind, the American Republic is now assuming imperial powers over what is left of the non-Communist world. The Bush and Clinton families are quietly instituting "les droits du roi" or right of inheritance to the American throne.

With "the return of the KGB," as Goldfarb subtitles his book about the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, the re-instatement of Stalinist principles in Russia is matching this bizarre volley ball game that the Bushes and Clintons have been playing with an increasingly imperial White House for 20 years.

With the Democrats and Republicans both looking more and more Progressive with each new administration, the United States is soon becoming the possession of a one-party governing class that rules with more and more centralized ferocity, à la the Roe v. Wade decision and the Waco tragedy, and less and less respect for state's rights. So, indeed, the death of the Roman Republic and that of the American Republic are not dissimilar.

The imperial aims of Communism, à la Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, became irresistible to both American political parties, and the Democrats and Republicans are both centralizing power in Washington, D. C., certain that American influence is more powerfully aimed and targeted out of a Federation rather than a Republic.

Unfortunately for us, the federal government, like Imperial Rome, demands that the American population look the other way, or even, as in the case of Roe v. Wade, support man's inhumanity to man.

Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Moriarty is also running for President of the United States in 2008 as a candidate for the Realists Party. To find out more about Moriarty's presidential campaign, contact rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.